Marriage and Child Well-Being: Research and Policy Perspectives

Over the past decade, the linkages between marriage and child well-being have attracted the attention of researchers and policy makers alike. Children's living arrangements have become increasingly diverse and unstable, which raises important questions about how and why family structure and stability are related to child outcomes. This article reviews new research on this topic, emphasizing how it can inform policy debates about the role of marriage in reducing poverty and improving child outcomes. It also pays special attention to new scholarship on unmarried, primarily low-income families, the target of recent federal marriage initiatives, to appraise the potential contributions of family research to ongoing policy discussions.     

A University-Community Partnership to Change Public Policy

Abstract

This paper describes a project aimed at promoting major change in government policy toward the growing problem of food insecurity in Israel. The project was initiated by Ben-Gurion University in collaboration with community service and social advocacy organizations. This joint action led to a dramatic change in government activity. The problem of food insecurity moved from a state of obfuscation to the establishment of a special ministerial committee mandated to develop policy guidelines for a national school lunch program. For higher education to contribute to the community, necessary preconditions must exist: Is the faculty committed to promotion of social change? Do the organizational and community environments legitimize university-sponsored activity for such purposes? Is the faculty competent to act effectively in the community and adopt strategies for political influence? Are there organizational mechanisms, action frameworks, and community contacts that enable collaboration for the purposes of social change? This case discussion uses the analytical framework developed by Taylor (1985) to evaluate the preconditions for action and the processes involved in facilitating university-community collaboration for promoting policy change.     

我国儿童保护立法政策综述

近30年来,我国儿童保护立法政策不断发展,儿童保护涵盖了儿童救助、收养、教育、安全、医疗卫生等方面内容,已形成以宪法为基础,依托于儿童专项法律及国务院行政法规,以部门规章及政策性文件为主体的儿童保护立法政策体系。然而,存在儿童保护立法层级低,呈分散化、碎片化特征;涉及部门多,业务有重合也有空白;缺乏预防性措施;缺乏责任主体和罚则等问题。     

Guides to Family and Child Welfare Policy

The statement published below has been received from the Child Welfare Advisory Council of New South Wales. It has been submitted with the permission of the Minister for Child Welfare and Social Welfare in that State, the Honourable J. L. Waddy.     

Design Imperatives to Enhance Evidence-Based Interventions with Persuasive Technology: A Case Scenario in Preventing Child Maltreatment

ABSTRACT

This article examines how current thinking in persuasive technologies may be applied to evidence-based therapeutic interventions through a planned and multidisciplinary design process. Design steps identified in the human services and the design sciences are merged to generate six design imperatives. The need for human service knowledge to inform design is discussed in each design imperative. A case scenario using Healthy Families America (HFA), a broadly implemented child abuse and neglect prevention program, is presented as illustrative. The final design imperative argues for continuous attention to ethics across all disciplines. The design imperatives provide an initial framework for optimizing the development of persuasive technology applications in the human services.     

European Union Policy on Older Adult Learning: A Critical Commentary

Recently, some researchers have argued that high state rates of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Online Survey, Certification and Reporting (OSCAR) nursing facility deficiencies indicate stringent enforcement, leaving the impression of better-quality care soon to follow; others maintain that the rank ordering of states' quality of nursing facility care remains fairly constant, resting on deep-seated state characteristics that change slowly, so that short-term improvement in poor-quality care is unlikely. The authors examine change in the process and outcome quality of states' Medicare nursing facility long-term care programs across 1999 to 2005, using linear and two-stage least squares regression. They find that (1) nationally, process quality generally falls across this period while outcome quality generally increases; (2) neither a prominent enforcement stringency index nor state culture, a relatively stable state characteristic, exerts much influence on state process and outcome quality scores over time, but (3) the relative costs and benefits for CMS compliance appear to contribute to explaining change in states' quality of resident outcomes over time; and (4) states' process quality is much less stable than outcome quality, and outcome indices distinct from OSCAR deficiency data provide more reliable and possibly more valid measures of care quality.     

Recognising and Enabling Social Workers to Promote Child Wellbeing and Protection

The paper explores the relevance of social enterprise to social work practice and policy development. Social enterprise refers to a broad set of approaches that use business acumen to address social goals. A marginal activity in social work for a long time, recently social enterprise has been thrust into the spotlight in debates about the future of social policy and community services. It is important that social workers understand the meaning and implications of social enterprise if they are to apply it critically and reflectively in practice and participate in contemporary debates about its relevance in promoting individual and community empowerment. The paper provides an overview of the meaning of social enterprise, outlines the reasons for the renewed focus on social enterprise and related concepts in social policy debates, particularly community economic development, and examines its underlying values. It concludes with a discussion of questions and concerns surrounding the implementation of social enterprise in Australia.     

A Model of Choice for Public Policy

Punctuated equilibrium is supposed to be a viable alternativeto incrementalism, and, indeed, the authors of the model havesometimes made such claims. But punctuated equilibrium was developedto explain change in policy subsystems and does not serve asa complete model of policy choice in the same way that incrementalismhas served. This article develops a full-blown and viable modelof choice for public policy based on disproportionate informationprocessing. Its dynamics are based in the allocation of politicalattention to policy topics and the manner in which politicalsystems process information. The model leads directly to outcomesthat are consistent with punctuated equilibrium and are notgenerally consistent with incrementalism. Incrementalism, however,may be deduced from the model as a special case. The model isbest tested using stochastic process approaches. Incrementalismlogically must yield a normal distribution of outcomes, butdisproportionate information processing yields leptokurtic outcomes.Adding institutional constraints only makes the stochastic processimplications more severe. To support our arguments, we presentboth static and dynamic simulations of these processes. We alsoshow that these simulations are consistent with observationsof U.S. government budgets.     

Racial Differences on Well-Being among Aged and Disabled Public Housing Residents

This research examined racial differences in well-being among aged and disabled public housing residents. Predictors of interest to this research included health and functional status, income and income adequacy, social integration, and residential preference and perception of environmental quality. Participants in this research included a random sample of 427 (186 white and 241 black) aged and disabled public housing residents. Findings from this research indicate that environmental perception and preference along with health are of greater importance among white residents while among blacks health and income adequacy are more critical in determining moral among aged and disabled public housing residents.     

Childhoods in Policy: A Critical Analysis of National Child Protection Policy in the Philippines

This article investigates policy in the Philippines relating to the protection of children, which, despite policy efforts in this space, and growing evidence of child maltreatment and its impact, remains unexamined by the literature. It examines constructions of childhoods utilising a critical policy analysis of national policy documents concerning children's welfare and protection. Analysis finds conflicting representations of children's agency, defining children as ‘becomings’, but also as rights holders and social actors, viewing children as both embedded in, and reliant on, family, consequently detailing important insights into Filipino policy‐making and society.     

促进小额贷款公司健康发展的政策体系研究

小额贷款是金融制度的创新,是对现代金融体系的提升和扬弃。小额贷款公司等微型金融是国家金融系统的必要组成部分,是国家普惠金融体系的一个特殊机构。小额贷款公司的出现延伸了金融服务的广度和深度,在一定程度上缓冲了银行的信贷风险,也使得金融体系更具包容性,从而完善了金融支持经济的功能。小额信贷不仅能促进一国的经济增长,也会丰富金融体系和金融监管的内涵。应设计出更加符合发展需求的政策体系,使小贷公司有更好的发展愿景。     

Medical Commentary on the National Institute of Child Health and Development Consensus Statement on the Investigation of Child Sexual Abuse

No abstract available for this article.     

From Community to Public Safety Governance in Policing and Child Protection

L'interopérabilité grandissante entre le maintien de l'ordre et la protection de l'enfant au Canada et au Royaume‐Uni semble indiquer que nous nous trouvons au milieu d'un changement gouvernemental passant de la gouvernance communautaire à une gouvernance de la sécurité publique. En effet, les discours mettant l'accent sur l'expertise locale en maintien de l'ordre et en protection de l'enfant se sont grandement transformés en raison des critiques sur le manque d'interdépendance entre les organismes. Les deux pays ont maintenant créé des bases de données interinstitutionnelles pour la gestion des personnes à risque. Cette intégration administrative engendre différentes formes de réglementations. Les auteurs concluent leur article en soutenant que cet ethos émergeant peut être conceptualisé comme une rationalité gouvernementale naissante. The growing interoperability between policing and child protection in Canada and the United Kingdom suggests that we are in the midst of a governmental shift from community governance to public safety governance. Indeed, discourses emphasizing local expertise in policing and child protection have largely muted because of criticisms over the lack of interagency interconnectedness. Both countries have now developed national interagency databases for the management of persons of risk. This institutional integration engenders different forms of regulation. We conclude by arguing that this emergent ethos may be conceptualized as a nascent governmental rationality.     

构建公共服务平台促进教学资源库的建设——以常州机电职业技术学院教学资源库建设为例

本文针对教学资源库建设的现状以及制约教学资源库建设的因素,提出了教学资源库建设公共服务平台的模块,分析了各个模块服务的内容和功能。     

Public Opinion on Foreign Policy: The Multilateral Public that Perceives Itself as Unilateral

Americans have a strong preference for multilateral foreignpolicies over unilateral foreign policies. But do Americansknow their own preferences? Data from a national survey showwide misperceptions of public opinion on foreign policy. WhileAmericans strongly prefer multilateral policies, they overestimatepublic support for unilateral policies. For example, while only23 percent of respondents agreed that the more important lessonof September 11 is that the United States should work aloneto fight terrorism rather than work with other countries, respondentsestimated that almost 50 percent of Americans endorsed thisview. Moreover, misperceptions of public opinion were relatedto subsequent judgments of specific policies. For example, respondentswho incorrectly perceived the unilateral view as the majorityview were 1.84 times more likely to support a presidential decisionto invade Iraq without the approval of the United Nations (UN)Security Council than respondents who correctly perceived theunilateral view as the minority view. Misperceptions of publicopinion were also associated with the belief that the currentforeign policy reflects the opinions of the American people.This belief in the legitimacy of the foreign policy was as stronga predictor of support for specific unilateral policies as respondents’attitudes.